The credit bureaus will have to remove adverse information and judgement listings from your credit profile – if the amount owed has been settled. Consumers no longer need to have their judgement rescinded to get it removed from their credit profile. Furthermore, the retention period for default listings is 12 months and retention periods concerning administration and sequestration orders are 5 years.

If you have reached your retention period and the information is still listed on your record we would suggest you firstly dispute your credit listing with the company where you pulled your credit report. If you have a complaint about a specific credit provider you can lodge a complaint with the Credit Ombud.

You can check your credit record with any credit bureau. TransUnion is the best, so we would suggest pulling your record there. By law you are allowed to pull your credit record for free once a year. Here is a link to TransUnion’s site.

Also keep in mind that there are 4 major credit bureaus. TransUnion, Experian, XDS and Compuscan. It can be that some of these other credit bureaus have not yet updated your profile, so it would be advisable to check your score with all of them.